{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3284",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 3284,
    "subject": "Selves and Souls under Suns: a Sermon or Summary of Sorts",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-05-28T19:53:21+00:00",
    "last": "2002-05-28T19:53:21+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0205-1110@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes",
        "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com"
      },
      "date": "2002-05-28T19:53:21+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Selves and Souls under Suns: a Sermon or Summary of Sorts",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "A reading from EXODUS:\n\n\tAfter a monent of silence, [Mint] added, \"You've lost your \n\tfaith, or most of it, I think. What's happened to us?\"\n\t     Potto laughed loudly.\n\t     Quetzal, seated between Oosik and Loris at the other \n\tend of the table, murmured, \"Circumstances have changed, \n\tMaytera. That's all, or nearly all. There is an essential \n\tcore at the center of each man and woman that remains \n\tunaltered no matter how life's externals may be transformed \n\tor recombined. But it's smaller than we think.\"\n\t     Silk nodded his agreement.\n\t     \"If I - ah - permitted.\" Remora pushed back the errant \n\tlock of lank, black hair. \"The General and I were companions \n\tin, um, adversity. The - ah - spirit. The inalterable core, \n\tas His Cognizance has, um, finely. The spirit that survives \n\teven death. It grows when trod upon, like the dandelion. I \n\thave learned it, eh? So may you, if you -um - reflect.\"\n\nI think this is the key passage for one of the things LS, and indeed \nthe whole Lupiverse cycle, is about: the nature of the self and the \nsoul. Quetzal makes the key point, and receives support from both \nSilk and Remora: that the \"essential core,\" i.e., the \"soul,\" is \n\"smaller than we think\" ... meaning, I suggest, that much of what \nwe think of as our \"self\" or \"identity\" is not a part of the \"soul.\"\n\nThe Lupiversal approach to identity and to souls seems to me very\nmuch motivated by a desire to make clear just what the soul is _not_. \nI mean that, in a universe where a whack on the head can radically \nalter personality, where is there a place for the immortal and \nimmaterial soul? Similarly, in a world where certain neurological \ndisorders can cause a person to be incapable of the freedom to make \ncertain types of moral choice*, is that person damned for his or her \nimmorality? Is the \"soul\" something separate from the body, or just\nan epiphenomenon of a certain level of behavioral organization (and,\nif the latter, how is a \"resurrection\" possible)? And does it have \nanything to do with what we normally consider our self or identity?\n\n-----\n* Start with simple intellectual incapacity, move up to Tourette's\n  and certain rare epilepsies, and go on from there...\n-----\n\nBeginning with _The Book of the New Sun_, we have been presented\nwith a series of physical phenomena that radically question our\nusual concept of personal identity: the Revolutionary; the alzabo\nand its related analeptic; the serially resurrected Severian; his\nvery different \"mergers\" with Thecla and the line of the Autarchs; \nthe aquastors; robots and chems, taluses and Talos; the gods of \nMainframe; their ability to possess and \"enlighten\"; Mucor; the \ninhumi; the uncountable Neighbors; and the very mysterious nature \nof the Narrator of tBotSS. \n\nI don't know that we can draw any really solid conclusions from \nthis -- indeed, I'm not at all sure that Mr Wolfe has a clear\ntheory to offer -- but I think it's clear that this _question_ \nis one of the fundamental things that he has been grappling with\nthrough much of his career, not only here but in, at a bare \nminimum, 5HC and the \"Soldier\" books. \n\nAll of which is kind of \"why I _DO_ like Short Sun.\""
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}